Plans and Conferences

Since you and I will only have 10 minutes to talk about your essay before you need to prepare its final draft, you will need to make good, focused use of that time.

At our meeting I’ll have on my desk the copy of the proto-draft that you gave me in class on Tuesday. You should bring a print-out of the most recent draft of your piece. On this draft you should:

Highlight changes or additions to the text that you’d like to draw my attention to;

Mark moments where you plan to add to what you’ve written, noting as specifically as you can the content of those additions;

Mark passages you intend to rework or cut;

Write out any questions you’d like to ask me.

Please make these annotations by hand in ink on the print-out of your draft. Have a pen ready to jot down any other notes or changes that occur to you during our meeting. Bring the same print-out with your notes and highlights on it to your conference with both your GTA and me. That way you will have all our responses to your piece in the same place.

I will ask you to bring an all-but-final draft of your essay to class on Tuesday, 10/11. We will work that day on line-editing—technical, sentence-level stuff. The final version of your essay will be due at 4:00 pm on Wednesday 10/12. So these conferences will be your last real chance to get feedback on the argument, structure, and tone of your essay.